Why Do So Many Wealthy Democrats Think The Only Money That Matters To The Hoi Polloi Is The Money They Must Pay To The Government? [with update]

Second, single-payer would require a lot of additional tax revenue — and we would be talking about taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy. It’s true that higher taxes would be offset by a sharp reduction or even elimination of private insurance premiums, but it would be difficult to make that case to the broad public, especially given the chorus of misinformation you know would dominate the airwaves.

Finally, and I suspect most important, switching to single-payer would impose a lot of disruption on tens of millions of families who currently have good coverage through their employers. You might say that they would end up just as well off, and it might well be true for most people — although not those with especially good policies. But getting voters to believe that would be a very steep climb.

Health Reform Realities, Paul Krugman arguing today in his New York Times column against attempts to enact single-payer, Medicare-for-all healthcare insurance

Good grace.  Where to begin.

Maybe by quoting myself with this excerpt from my post from yesterday, posted before the debate began:

Having no healthcare insurance is not the same as having healthcare insurance.  Unless of course the medical care you need is not covered by the insurance you have, because the deductibles and co-pays under your employer-provided insurance or under the policy you bought through a state marketplace under Obamacare for a premium low enough that your employer or you could afford it, means (unlike more comprehensive plans that others have but you do not) that you must pay those medical bills yourself.

Apparently, Chelsea Clinton doesn’t get out much these days.*

But then, neither, it appears, does her mother, who has claimed repeatedly, including in comments in defense of her daughter’s odd statements about Sanders’ single-payer concept, that the only expenses—the only money people pay—that actually matters to them is money paid to the government.

No other expenses count as money—as loss of income or as other expenditure that actually effects your and your family’s financial bottom line and therefore standard of living.  Money paid to UnitedHealthcare or Anthem Blue Cross in premiums, and to hospitals, physicians and medical labs in co-pays and deductibles, don’t count.  That’s not money paid to the government, see.  So it’s wayyy better to pay more for less-comprehensive coverage to private insurance companies, and still be financially insecure about medical expenses, than to pay less money in healthcare costs to the government and be financially secure about medical expenses.  Because, y’know … the government.

Which—I wish Sanders would point out—is exactly what Clinton says.  Again and again. Just like the Republicans do.

Hillary Clinton should get out more, too.

Sanders did almost exactly that in the debate last night.  But I hope, especially in light of Krugman’s column today, that he points out that the Democratic politicians and commentators who say the public thinks that the only money that matters to their financial bottom line, the only expenses that effect their standard of living, is taxes. Or that the math involved to understand that that is not so is too complicated for most folks to perform.

Calculators are cheap these days.  Even the hoi polloi can afford one.

Sanders got it right last night.  This is the Republican mantra.  And it’s no longer selling so well.

But Sanders also should question why it is that the Clintons and now Krugman, and surely other wealthy Democrats, think (or claim to think) that large and annually increasing healthcare premiums and co-pays and deductibles don’t matter to middle class and so-called working class folk because they’re paid to private insurance companies and private hospitals, physicians and medical labs. Sanders’ next ad should feature one of those folk saying that his or her family’s healthcare insurance premiums and the four-figure medical bills they are paying for a short hospital stay are actual money.  Honestly and truly.

Another ad should show a small-business owner discussing the amount the business pays in premiums for private insurance for its employees and that paying less to the government in additional taxes than the amount it is paying for private insurance could be paid instead in increased salaries and wages.

And there should be a third ad, maybe featuring that very same small-business owner, explaining that the business has a few employees who are seniors and receive, um, Medicare—and that the business pays for their excellent Medicare supplement insurance.  Not complicated.  And not very costly, given that Medicare is—yes, really—itself good insurance. So … voila! Hard feelings by those employees because they aren’t part of the awesome UnitedHealthcare plan that the younger-than-65 employees have and love.

Okay, look.  Only people who are, like the Clintons and Krugman, financially way-more-than-comfortable would actually think that people who aren’t don’t care how much they pay in healthcare premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses because the checks are made out not to the federal government but instead to private entities and parties.  And that only the most sophisticated among the rest of us will understand that Medicare combined with platinum plated supplemental policies paid by their employer will give them the same awesome benefits that they receive now.  Maybe even better.  Even though it will cost the employer less money.  (Less real money.  Really!)

The Clinton claims and Krugman arguments are profoundly elitist.  They’re spades that should be called, by Sanders, what they are: spades.

Krugman, too, should get out more.

*Chelsea Clinton said last week that she doesn’t “want to live in a country that has an unequal health care system again.”  As I said in my post yesterday, she apparently wants to move to France.  Or Canada.  Or Scandinavia, or Germany, or Thailand.  Or one of the many other Western-style democracies that has an equal health care system.

—-

UPDATE: Reader Lee Russ has posted this comment to the Comments thread:

Krugman’s assessment leaves out one extremely important reality and understates a second.

He left out the reality that his approach is a surrender to the power of the health insurance industry that, as he says, “played a major part in killing health reform in the early 1990s.” As he also says, Obamacare was specifically designed to rely on private insurance to keep those insurers from killing it. Now Krugman recommends walking away from a national healthcare system that even he acknowledges is both better and less expensive than Obamacare, again in deference to the insurance industry’s desires. Allowing the insurance industry to control our lives and our health is not practicality, it is an abandonment of our
rights in a democracy and it is a very big mistake.

Krugman also understates the problems that Obamacare is causing out here in “reality.” Expanding Medicaid has helped the poorest of us get some care, but that program’s low reimbursement rates mean that many doctors decline to treat Medicaid patients. The doctors who do take Medicaid are swamped by the newly Medicaid eligible, and may lose money treating them.

For many people who buy insurance policies through the exchange, massive deductibles must be paid before the insurer pays anything. Doctors across the country have noted the increase in the number of “insured” patients who are having serious problems figuring out how to both eat and pay their deductibles. Krugman wrongly says that “access to health insurance for all Americans” has been the goal. It’s access to health care—not to insurance—that matters. Obamacare too often fails to achieve it.

Exactly.